Yes, personally I end up disabling these new UIs and putting it back to normal anyway.

The day they don't let me disable it and set it how it always was is the day I stop using it most likely, with each and every new design ever other version I'm concerned one day they'll see classic as too legacy!

The last few releases of Firefox have had the UI driven by graphics designers, rather than programmers, and these have been by far the shittiest Firefox UIs ever. Each one strips away more and more useful features, and hence becomes much more difficult to use.

Can we please have the programmers come up with the UI design? At least with the earlier Firefox releases, they put together something that was usable, even if it wasn't as "pretty" as what the designers might come up with.

Frankly, I don't use Chrome because it has a shitty, stripped-down UI that intentionally hides all of the useful functionality. That's why I used to use Firefox. But if Firefox is going to imitate Chrome, why the fuck would I use Firefox? Even Konqueror is more usable than recent Firefox releases, so I'll stick with it until Firefox's UI isn't a compile cesspool.

then they should add the new ui as an "add on" or "modification". they shouldn't bump the version number for that. also, if it looks like that on my win7, I'll have to get an add on to make it look like old. I like border decors. they let me resize the window, it's called usability and these mockups seem to miss them. moving address bar to a place where you could configure it before is not "new" thing either, neither is adding different svg's between the tabs.

Indeed, usually the best UI is one where everything is where you expect it to be, where do I expect things to be? The same damn place it was yesterday. Even if it is going from an oddball place to a better one, it still isn't helpful if it changes every other week. First we go crazy with version numbers, now we're going crazy with UI changes just for the heck of it. What on earth is the open source community smoking these days.

When media players started fighting over UI design 10 years ago, this meant all functionality was there, from then on they fought for the user who needs new features every N days for no reason. It looks like the browser marked is no in the same state.

Observation: Thud547 seems to have no problem finding his water dish and it works very well for keeping him hydrated:

Firefox developer: I'll bet he'd like it if we put his water dish at a remote location along the Amazon river! I'll bet nobody has ever thought of this, much less tried it! This is going to be so f'ing awesome!!!!!11

I've been using OSX Firefox for a long time, and brother, right now, it is *seriously* broken. Were it my product, it'd be time to stop with the new features and FIX it before going on. It behaves pathologically when trying to answer posts on slashdot; it crashes after viewing flicker lightbox streams for more than a hundred or so images; it doesn't take the first click on a tab close button; and I have seen the "well, this is embarrassing" crash announcement more times than I could be bothered to count sin

I've been using OSX Firefox for a long time, and brother, right now, it is *seriously* broken. Were it my product, it'd be time to stop with the new features and FIX it before going on. It behaves pathologically when trying to answer posts on slashdot

Whoa there! Try reading slashdot on a mobile phone (and not using the old format). Then realize it is not Firefox which is broken, it is slashdot.

I like Opera as a browser, I don't like its UI though that much, I actually prefer the simplest possible UI of like Netscape 4 or something of that type, so to me this looks just counterintuitive as a computer program. That's why I am not fully on Opera, but I force myself to use it because it works better.

They've been swiping bits from Opera for years. The most recent versions even have the right click "Paste and Go" for the address bar which was always one of my favorite obscure Opera-centric behaviors.

I'm quite happy it's there, too, but then I'm one of those freakish Opera fans and anything that makes Firefox more like Opera is A-OK with me.

I like Opera's unique features; sadly it can be a bitch to get CSS written properly for it (now, I am no CSS expert, and only dabble when the situation calls for it, so I may not be the most reliable observer).

As one of Opera's five users, I will say that its defaults are fairly Chrome / modern Firefox-ish already. Opera always had tabs above the address bar, not below, and newer versions have a minimalist UI (like a Firefox style single menu), as is the style nowadays. I wish they hadn't followed the general theme of making everything monochrome though.

Opera has a fairly flexible set of UI settings, and a reasonable skinning system so you can turn off most of this minimalism and go back to something more traditi

As long as I can still get my tabs and shit below the even-more-goddamn-awesomebar, and put a status bar addon in, I'm not going to complain. Default layouts are fine-- it's when you suddenly can't modify them any more that I start to get tetchy.

There's a reason my personal firefox config log is labeled "the hoops I jump through.txt". Every release they give me more of what I don't want, and break the add-ons that give me what I do want. It's getting pretty tedious stripping these things down just to build them back up again.

I think the home tab is a good idea... for people who use a home page and also only have 1 of them and also actually revisit it multiple times in the life of a window. So long as the other 85% of us can hide it, that's fine. But there comes a time when "you can customize it" stops being a feature, and starts being an excuse to ignore user wants and do whatever the hell you want. Really, is the UI something that needs to be continually re-defined? Couldn't we spend the effort on something else? Something other than badly imitating Chrome?

There's a reason my personal firefox config log is labeled "the hoops I jump through.txt". Every release they give me more of what I don't want, and break the add-ons that give me what I do want. It's getting pretty tedious stripping these things down just to build them back up again.

Honest question: Beyond "that's not the way it always has been", what is the problem with tabs on top?

I'll be the first to admit that I was very hesitant about putting tabs on the title bar, but after letting myself get used to it for a while I see a at least a couple distinct advantages. First the obvious, you gain some vertical screen space, which is always handy on modern widescreen monitors. Less obviously, you make it more clear that the UI elements at the top of the page are affecting the current t

I'll be the first to admit that I was very hesitant about putting tabs on the title bar, but after letting myself get used to it for a while I see a at least a couple distinct advantages. First the obvious, you gain some vertical screen space, which is always handy on modern widescreen monitors.

Tabs above/below the address bar I couldn't care less about, but I do not like tabs in the title bar. That comes at the cost of losing some vertical grabbing range for the mouse and no longer having a place to put th

It's a question of what you get in exchange for the lost space. For the title bar, the number of times that I've needed to see the complete page title (and the title has been too long to fit in the tab header) is pretty small. As for mouse grabbing, I generally run maximized on smaller displays (my at home PC is a laptop) and at work I use Winsplit Revolution to manage my windows via keyboard so I suppose I've never noticed.

Removing the status bar has a much larger impact IMO. Loading status is missing a

First, why does everyone say tabs on top gains you vertical screen space? The last time i tested it, moving the tab bar above the other bars didn't actually gain any space, in fact i think it even lost a pixel or two.

I've also never had any trouble figuring out that the UI elements were going to affect the tab i was currently viewing, and having them below the tab just seems stupid. My mental image is that the tabs are at the top of a folder that contains the webpage, just like the metaphor where the tab

Ahh, yes, i was misunderstanding you, but personally tabs in the title bar is even worse. Putting tabs above the other bars just breaks my mental image of how tabs work. Putting them in the title bar actually harms usability for me.

I've been using Chrome for... a year? Maybe longer? (How long has Chrome been out at this point anyways?) And i _still_ keep missing when i try to grab the window and move it, especially if there's another window behind and just above it that does have a title bar. Or even wors

Everyone is headed down the minimalist road because the of the netbook and tablet craze. Some people still choose high horsepower machines with dual (or more) screens. Look at Ubuntu's unity desktop. The whole damn OS has chosen that path. Buttons, menus, and options that aren't buried and are ready at hand are a GOOD thing when you have screen real estate to burn. Many people still do.

Honest question: Beyond "that's not the way it always has been", what is the problem with tabs on top?.

For those of us whose browse with many tabs open at once and frequently switch between them, tabs on top means a *lot* more mouse movement to accomplish this, which equals more time. Wasted time.
It may not seem like much, but it is enough to be a noticeable delay, and adds up. Putting the tabs back where they belong solves this annoyance.

This may not be a factor depending on your own personal browsing habits.

The impact may seem small but because title space is limited instead of companies displaying their titles like so:

Document Title - Site Name [- Browser Name]

Because companies want their brand name read it will most likely become:

Site Name - Document Title [- Browser Name]

Now put this in context of tabs, as you start to have more tabs open at once you'll see less and less of the actual document title and tabs will start looking the same until you hover over or switch tabs. This is counter productive and ine

Browsers have now reached the maturity of 1950s American cars. They more or less work, still break too much, use too much fuel, and have lots of chrome and tailfins.

Unless you've been living under a rock, it should be obvious that browsers have been trending toward less chrome (i.e., a less distracting UI) by removing a lot of UI clutter. The comparison to 1950s American cars seems completely wrong, at least where the UI is concerned.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of things they could do to improve Firefox (e.g. back-end performance) that are neither noticeable nor able to be developed in the timeframe of one release cycle.

The first thing I'd like to see them do is offer (but not impose) the ability to run every tab as a separate process. That should offer a workaround to a significant amount of the unaddressed memory leaks that everybody's experiencing.

Popups generated from click events are generally unblocked since they are, obviously, user generated and presumably a link to something the user wants to see; however, this is not always the case. What I really want is a whitelist for popups. Not a whitelist that says "this site is allowed to create popups" but a whitelist that says "these sites are allowed to be popped up by other sites". I can't tell you how many times I've hit the facebook connect popup despite the fact that I have never once done it

It's not just them. IE and Opera are also going the Chrome route. Personally I hate it too. The purpose of the frameworks an OS provides is to make the look and feel of all the apps look the same. And presumably since the user picked the particular OS, then they like the look and feel of that framework,

Yeah, the way that the traditional menu bar has been tossed aside is distressing. It was invented to create a consistent user interface between programs (as well as provide a consistent API) in order to eliminate the issue of everything being drastically different.

But now we're seeing most of the major browsers playing follow-the-leader by clumping menu operations into a single button, putting things indifferent places, and then Microsoft's ribbon bullshit that thinks every operation should be presented to you in a big kludgey mess of buttons and symbols. At least the web browsers and Windows Explorer allow you to tap the alt key to get a temporary glimpse of the old menu, but who's to say how long before that is removed?

And as a UNIX user and programmer for decades now I always had to put up with Apple and MS peopel get worked up about the inconsistency between widget sets in X11. Now that Windows finally has a UI that has the sophisticatin to allow the dev to break the mold everyone is wanderign off on their own basically custom widgets.

It's not how much inch the monitor is, but what the vertical resolution is.
Those idiotic HD resolutions meant cutting down quite a lot on resolution which means cutting down on spare height for menus etc..
I'm going to keep running my 1920x1200 laptop as long as possible, those screens just keep getting more expensive!

Though to be fair, it was more their marketing campaign than their actual software. The effect of Apple on tech designers appears to be similar to the effect of LSD on the hippies--in both the positive and negative senses.

That's great if you are talking about introducing something new to people but by now a majority of the population understands how browsers work and would be put off by suddenly changing things around because some usability expert in a glass castle decides it makes more sense.

You'd be surprised just how much you are overstating that. Most people really don't get what most of their computer does. They've just memorized a few keyboard commands and some clicks and that's about as deep as their understanding goes.

But that's all you should need for using a browser. The problem becomes when those few clicks have moved or changed.

I did dozens of training classes when we moved from Office 2003 to 2007 because of the changes to the UI. In the long run pretty much universally everybody likes the new design now but in the beginning it confused the hell out of people.

Whatever happen to UI consistency? "Back in the day" UIs used to use the same toolkits, have their menus and toolbars all in the same spot and work consistently across applications. Today all those UI elements are kind of splattered around the application and there is really no consistency where you can find something anymore. There are also things in modern UIs that I really don't get, Firefox4 for example will present you different menus depending on if you click it with a mouse or if you activate it with the keyboard. What's the point in that? Didn't we figure out that changing menus where a really bad idea back when Windows tried it many years ago? Once up-on a time the menu was full of all the stuff the application could do, now its like playing hide and seek with the functions an application might have and hiding them from the user is really not helping.

Beats me, but when Apple decided to throw their own interface guidelines out the window and pointlessly rearrange the window icons on iTunes for whatever reason, and then again made the window icons on their App Store app center on the toolbar instead of the top of the window like every other app, it's become clear that the watchword for today is "change for the sake of change."

Incidentally, I notice that at some point after screwing with the iTunes window buttons for absolutely no reason, they've reverted them back to be like every other window that's not the App Store. So apparently Apple is slowly learning their own lessons about interface consistency.

Incidentally, I notice that at some point after screwing with the iTunes window buttons for absolutely no reason, they've reverted them back to be like every other window that's not the App Store. So apparently Apple is slowly learning their own lessons about interface consistency.

Not quite: try pressing the green "make the window as big as it needs to be to display all the content" button.

Apple is one of the worst offenders at breaking its own UI guidelines. iTunes is a fail, the App Store is a fail, Quick Time X is a huge fail. I haven't got it but I gather Aperture is also a fail.

Not quite: try pressing the green "make the window as big as it needs to be to display all the content" button.

Oh, that's awesome. Not only does it not actually "zoom" the application, what it actually does is what the "collapse" button (the little bar on the right of certain windows) is supposed to do.

Although the Zoom button has always effectively meant "do something random" so I've gotten in the habit of never touching it.

I always find it hilarious when Apple shits all over their own guidelines, especially when there's a ton of research and design behind them. Microsoft can get away with crap like making the Office windows not behave like any other window in their OS, because they've never sold themselves as being "the user interface experts," but Apple?

Come on, your HIG is enormous and generally explains why it suggests what it suggests. Why do you then ignore your own guidelines?

Incidentally, it's worth reading the Microsoft HIG for using custom window frames [microsoft.com] for examples of Microsoft applications that ignore their own guidelines. It's nice to know that Microsoft's interface people are aware that the Gadgets window is broken, even if they can't convince anyone on the Windows team to fix it.

Whatever happen to UI consistency? "Back in the day" UIs used to use the same toolkits, have their menus and toolbars all in the same spot and work consistently across applications. Today all those UI elements are kind of splattered around the application and there is really no consistency where you can find something anymore. There are also things in modern UIs that I really don't get, Firefox4 for example will present you different menus depending on if you click it with a mouse or if you activate it with the keyboard. What's the point in that? Didn't we figure out that changing menus where a really bad idea back when Windows tried it many years ago? Once up-on a time the menu was full of all the stuff the application could do, now its like playing hide and seek with the functions an application might have and hiding them from the user is really not helping.

Web browsers are a special case, because they are increasingly being used to run web applications.

If web browsers were to keep all the chrome of a regular application, you end up with a pretty cluttered display: a full blown application (the web app) within a full blown application (the web browser). Yuck.

I, for one, am pleased that web browser UIs are increasingly getting out of the way so that I can concentrate on the web app they are hosting. However, web browser makers might be able to please everyone b

The most frustrating thing for me is that FF 5 moved the Home button all the freaking way to the right.... My mouse is often around the forward/back buttons and the beginning of the URL box.... why can't the reload and home key button be there too?

I'm not saying I like all the UI changes from Firefox 3.6 to 4/5, but this is one of the easiest changes to overcome if you don't like it. That being said, I did move the Home button back but am finding that I really don't stop/reload being where they are--plus, there are easy keyboard shortcuts for them both, anyway, that I normally use instead.

That's great and all but most people don't want to have to change a bunch of shit like that to get something working right. Yes, in and of itself that is a minor annoyance but a bunch of those put together (and there are many that can be lobbed at Firefox) overall makes the software far more annoying to use than it should be. Now this does not mean that they should try to solve the problem by copying Chrome outright. This is why you come up with sane defaults that the vast majority of users will be comfo

My first reaction on seeing the headline was "oh, this ought to be awful." But, you know, that's just a gut reaction. I should really give them the benefit of the doubt.

(click)

OK, first thing I notice is that there's now no forward button. It shows up again later, so I guess the idea is that it vanishes if you don't need it?...uh, OK, but I kind of like having a UI that doesn't randomly change size based on what tab I'm looking at.

These are Mac OS X screenshots, so the menu shouldn't be in the window anyway, but it appears they've moved everything to a small cog. No, wait, later there's a Windows 7 version, and the menu is still the orange Firefox thing, so I guess the cog is Mac OS X only?

They're finally merging the search and URL bars, which I'm sure some Slashdotters will scream bloody murder over, but which I can't help but think it's about time. (Really, not too hard to tell a URL from a search term, and given that the "awesome" bar is already a search feature, they might as well give me more space so that I can see the entire URL.)

Over all it doesn't look too horrible compared to their current interface. May even be an improvement.

Now the only question left is how many extensions will be required to restore the toolbar so I can keep my NoScript and Firebug icons fucking available since I frequently need to use them. You took away my status bar, please don't take away my toolbar too.

Also, I wonder what new bugs they'll introduce to Firefox under Windows Aero. Gotta love Aero Glass freaking out whenever you mouse over a link. (How did you even do that?!)

Re:#1: They can solve that problem by copying Opera (more). In opera, I can set any search I want to a keyword of any length. So, for instance "g opera" does a Google search for "opera", while "w opera" does a Wikipedia search (not by default, but insanely easy to customize). "gs opera" does an SSL Google search, etc. You can even set up customized searches this way. For instance, you could make a Newegg search that orders by price. Inputting no keyword does default engine. Also addresses #2. Not sure why F

No, you're just looking at a variety of screenshots of various brainstormed proposals. Stuff along the lines of "we should think about this and see whether it makes sense", as opposed to "the next Firefox UI" like the BS summary says.

As it turns out, it appears that Firefox already treats the URL bar like a search bar. If you enter in a string with spaces, it will auto-search it in Google. (And not whatever you've set your search provider to be in the Search Bar, which is... interesting.)

Really, I think most people find that not having a separate "search bar" is more useful. If you want to enter a URL, start with "http://", and it will take you to any URL you need to go to. Otherwise, it'll do a search.

I'm probably alone, but I rather like the new UI. Reminds me of Chrome. I switched to Chrome recently because FF5 on OS X was just crashing too much and had gotten too slow, might switch back if this works similarly faster and is stable again.

If UI designers listened to the tech community we'd still be using something that looked like an early Netscape. There was plenty of room for improvement there, and a lot of things just don't make sense anymore and never really did anyway. Permanent status bars are a g

I'm probably alone, but I rather like the new UI. Reminds me of Chrome.

And I hate it for the same reason (that is, I hate Chrome-style UI). I have a big monitor, so there is no point in hiding the menu or the status bar to make it fit. FF3 with all toolbars (menu bar, navigation bar, bookmarks bar, tab bar, status bar) enabled still has enough screen space that I do not need to maximize it (my desktop resolution is 1600x1200 btw).

Permanent status bars are a good thing to be rid of, for instance.

Why?Status bar is useful for me:1.It displays the URL of the link that I am about t

I understand you are designing for the lowest common denominator. It makes sense, and I can see where you are going with this design direction.

However, please be sure to allow configurability at the very least, and even better resist the urge to remove UI elements and hide them behind menus.

I dont want more buttons hidden behind more menus that require more clicks. On my desktop I have a large amount of room and like all my important options in front of me. That's why it's a great computing device for work. On my mobile phone, a sparse UI is much appreciated. But I dont really need it, nor want it, on a desktop. It doesnt make any sense in keeping with the idea of easy "discoverability" in user experience design. It also could easily confuse users even more than you think.

Most users can learn to recognize that a little "house" icon is the home screen. However, many users will not understand that setting the home page is under [alt] > Tools > options > General tab. Non-tech savvy people dont understand all of this multi layered categorization. They may not think the same way the developers and designers do, and may not put the option under the same category if they were doing the organization. They also may understand what they need, but not what the categories mean. Simple UI controls work better for most people. As an example: almost everyone understand lists and scrolling, even if they are very long lists.

It would also be nice if the bugs regarding new versions of FF corrupting profiles be looked into. And I don't know of any users that really feel the new "rapid release" stuff is worth a dime. The people who know what it means think it's silly, and the people who don't wouldn't care anyways.

Don't get me wrong, you guys have done fantastic work over the years. And the world owes you *much* gratitude. But I feel the need to speak up at some of the recent changes in direction Mozilla has been making with FF and TB. A need I have never felt before regarding either product. As a fan I wish you all the best though and hope to keep using FF and TB as I have never been that interested in Chrome or Gmail.

While certainly no one wants to be bombarded with 100,000 config options, I think you can agree there has been a movement to hide and simplfy UIs over the past few years especially, and that this particular UI looks more sparse than the last which looked more sparse than the previous and so on. I highly doubt we're just going to go to all text lists like in the past (and I wouldn't want that), but it was an example of a consistent UI element people have long learned to understand almost intuitively. There

How about trying to make the browser faster and more concurrent instead of spending time on unnecessary GUI changes?I often experience a huge slowdown in Firefox when I have five or so Firefox windows -- of which all but one are minimized.I often experience that the entire browser locks up to wait for a request... in another window than the one that I am reading in.I also get the feeling that the so called "awesome" bar becomes slower and slower with time.

Please read the comment appearing at the top of the web page [mozilla.com], and then un-wad your knickers, folks.

We appreciate your interest in our design experiments!The UI mock-ups shown on these pages were part of a meeting, and were for discussion purposes, and to explore different design directions. Some of them are already out of date.Mozilla works in the open, and the way to get the latest in UI improvements to Firefox is to download the UX channel build for your OS, which will auto-update every night with various design experiments we're looking at.

Unbunch your own knickers. Mozilla puts the stuff out there for comment. People comment. Many don't like it. That's the whole point of putting it out for comment early enough in the design process to be able to change things.

(Now all Mozilla needs to do is actually listen to the comments, and stop trying to imitate Chrome, Mac, or cellphone UIs. But, as another commenter said, so long as I can change the default, I'm not hopelessly hot and bothered.)

No, we are right to be concerned. These days, whenever a large company, open source or not put up something publically or semi-publically on their website, it means that they are going to implement it. It is a cheap way of product testing or to prepare users for the coming apocalypse, I mean, change. I am now starting to look around for other browsers to use. Mozilla has become what it was fighting when it started. I also blame female users for this (no, I'm serious). Look at the UI design of consumer products now days and you realise the over-simplified, over-cutesy, over-dumbed down design is catering for women and girly men who favours looks over function.

1) What happened to the forward button? I understand it's not used much, but it doesn't take up that much space, does it? As long as you can do the same functionality by holding down the back button like usual, then I should be fine. Not sure how discoverable that feature is, though...

2) I like the new tab style a lot, even if they don't really look like "tabs" as much as before, it's still an improvement to me. It really makes it look like the tab owns the browser chrome, good for usability purposes. This

"... a few different reasons why we are exploring the concept of a Home Tab, including: Creating an interface that is unique to Firefox"

But why? If I were a group of program developers that is still trying to steal users away from another program, I would make switching as easy as possible. Learning curves brought on by unique interfaces work against that.

Oh well... just make sure there's the option for a more traditional UI and I'll just switch to that when I upgrade- Why yes, my Windows 7 installation loo

It is kind of sobering to see how the concentrated company backed effort of Chrome overtook the 10 years old Firefox in just a few months, with FF running behind ever since. Be it optimizing for speed, new web technologies, UI design or even version numbering, the Mozilla folks look at the tail lights and try to keep up.BTW: I'm still using FF because of the add-ons and free GUI configurability.

The radius of the rounding on the tabs is hideous and looks nothing like any native control on any platform, I also hate this new fashion of placing the close, minimize and zoom buttons at some random pixel offset.

This design would work just as well with native looking widgets and button placement and wouldn't invoke the "uncanny valley" effect of being almost correctly placed. Why not just put the buttons in the middle of the web page and make the tabs floating round circles that you navigate between by wa

The one great strength Firefox has is its plugin system. Can the browser people please stop fucking with the interface and concentrate on the damn HTML renderer ? If I were to get hit in the head with the douche stick and suddenly wanted my Firefox to look like Chrome, I'd install a Chrome skin. If they're so obsessed with minimalist interfaces, fire the interface guy and let him release the dumb thing as a 3rd party plugin.

FPS level designers or something? Finding common functions requires the equivalent of an epic campaign with every release.
I can't blame my parents for being completely lost these days. I have a hard time helping them out myself and wonder what the hell happened to common sense and usability.

As I'm scrolling through the comments here, I'm seeing the same things repeated over and over again.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it: And ten years from now, the browser will be exactly the same as it is now. That's what you want, isn't it? Stagnation does not lead to a healthy project. Innovation does.

But... but... _everyone_ knows the surest way to improve your market share is to not do a goddamn thing, ever. Right?

In that mockup [mozilla.com], it depicts this stupid word for which I cannot pronounce the "t". WTF, Firefox?

I think that the Mozilla team just want you to keep saying "Chrome, Chrome, Chrome".

It looks to me that Mozilla's mission is to promote Google. When Google didn't have a browser, Firefox integrated Google search right into the browser. Now that Google has a browser, Mozilla seems hell bent on getting all of it's users to switch to that browser.

What is sad is it is a classic case of cargo cult usability [piestar.net] where they try to ape the looks but not what makes the Chromium based browsers great, and that is Webkit.

For example I have to support users on a wide range of hardware, from circa 2004 office P4s to first gen netbooks and nettops to the latest multicores and since 3.6.x Firefox has frankly been unsuitable for purpose on anything less than a 3GHz P4 with HT and 2Gb of RAM and even then you better close that sucker out daily to keep FF from slamming the swap. Compare this to what I've switched my customers to Comodo Dragon (Chromium based with some nice extra security features) and even on the 1.8Ghz Sempron I use as a nettop the Dragon is fast, it NEVER loses responsiveness, doesn't slam the CPU and I can leave it on for days because unlike FF when I'm not doing anything with it the memory footprint stops growing which isn't the case with FF. And this is of course while having low rights mode on Win Vista and 7 which FF still hasn't implemented.

I personally think it is Gecko. I just don't think the engine is able to take all the extras being bolted onto it like separate plugin containers. The guys at Moz can ape Chrome all they want to, it isn't gonna turn Gecko into Webkit.